Balance Foundations: An unshakeable view of self

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If you want to create a life that feels balanced you must have an unshakable view of yourself - I call that confidence. 

You must believe that you are amazing and valuable and good at what you do regardless of how much you get done, how prepared you are, or what anyone else thinks. An unshakeable view of self is a pillar in a balanced life and in this episode I’ll be sharing what it takes to create it. 

This is part 3 in our series on the foundational principals of work-life balance, you ready? Let’s get to it. 

Topics in this episode:

  • Importance of feeling acknowledged and supported in a community. 

  • Sharing my personal experience. 

  • How to build and maintain self-confidence. 

  • Identifying your core values. 

  • Separating self-worth from achievements. 

 Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

If you want to create a life that feels balanced, you must have an unshakable view of yourself. I call that confidence. 

You must believe that you are amazing and valuable and good at what you do, regardless of how much you get done, how prepared you are, or really what anyone else thinks. 

When you stop believing that your value is based on what you do and how much you do and how well you do it, your inner critic will soften. You'll feel more grounded and calm, and you'll be much more able to hold to your boundaries and priorities. 

An unshakable view of yourself is a pillar in a balanced life. This is part three in our series on the foundational principles of work life balance. You ready? Let's get to it. 

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it. 

Hey, working moms. I want to pause before we dive into today's topic and say that if you're really struggling right now, you're feeling overwhelmed, maybe parenting just feels really hard, harder than usual, alancing work and life is harder than usual. 

I just want you to know that I see you and that you are in the right place, and this community is meant for you. 

What I love about the ambitious and balanced working mom community is not only is it a place for you to be seen in all of the the hardness of being a working mom, it's a place for me as well. 

If you didn't listen to last week's episode, we actually took a pause in the middle of this balance foundations series for me to give you sort of the state of my mental health, which has not been great this year. And I kind of pulled back the curtain a little bit and showed you what's been going on with me and some of the strategies I'm using to really make sure I stay grounded and kind of connected and sane, if you will, in this season of life. 

And so I'm just so grateful to have a community that I get to be open and vulnerable in as well, because obviously this is exactly what I teach, right? 

Yes. I am a teacher and a coach, and I consider myself sort of being like a ninja to help working moms live the life that they want to live. 

And yet I am always needing to work on myself as well and on, balancing life and parenting and all of the things as well. It doesn't always feel easy to me. I'm juggling all things that feel overwhelming, and I just want to express my gratitude to this community of women for letting me be an ambitious and balanced working mom that is struggling, just like you. 

In my posts, in my emails, in my episodes of this podcast, I am able to be vulnerable. I'm sort of able to show you what's going on in my personal life. And I know that I'm always supported, and I am grateful for that. 

They say that it takes a village to raise kids, and I believe it takes a village for us to be the moms that we want to be. Right? 

A community of working moms.

We in this community are all a village of working moms that are rising up in our careers and trying to be present and connected parents as well. And I know that that's not easy for us. Right. 

The systems in this culture, particularly in America, are all stacked against us. And it's one of the reasons why I started this podcast as a way of offering support and giving practical strategies and tools to help you stay on course and keep going after the big things in your life. 

I know that I mentioned this opportunity a lot on the podcast, but I want to highlight it again for you right here and right now. Obviously, I'm a teacher. I give workshops and presentations. I teach on this podcast. I developed strategies and tools for working moms that I offer to my clients in one on one coaching. 

I help ambitious working moms just like you continue upward in your career, whatever that means to you, right? 

Because for some of you, that is staying the course, it's staying at your current company, it's getting promoted within your current company and kind of accelerating up.

But for others, that could be leaving your company, leaving the industry altogether, doing something else that you're totally passionate about. Maybe it's even starting a business or doing some consulting, whatever it means for you. I help you fulfill all of your dreams in your career while also remaining sane and having fun in your mom life. 

Recently, I described it in coaching as being success in sanity. Right? That's what I do. I help you create success in your life and have sanity in your life. 

Book a free coaching call.

And if you are looking to have a successful and sane life, then I want to invite you to book a free breakthrough call with me. This is your chance to tell me everything that's going on. All of the challenges, all of the dreams. I mean, at least as much as you know of them. And then for me to lay out a path for you to feel successful at both work and home. 

We take the time to talk about coaching. I want to answer all of your questions. We'll talk about the results of coaching, exactly what you're going to walk away with as you make the $8,000 investment in our time together. And I'm going to teach you how to have success and sanity in life. 

So if that's you, if you're ready to take that next step, please do book your free breakthrough call, and let's get that process started right away. All right, working mom. 

So we are in the middle of a series that I am calling the balance foundations. These are essentially the pillars of what it takes to create work life balance. Right. So far, we've talked about what balance is and what it's not. That was in the first part of the series.

And then last week we talked about the first c, which is clarity. You need to have really clear direction over the things that are most important to you and where you're headed in life if you want to feel balanced, because it ends a lot of the second guessing, and it makes decision making so much easier when you feel crystal clear. 

Confidence.

And then today, we're going to talk about the second out of the three, which is confidence. Now, you might have just rolled your eyes a little bit because confidence is sort of this overused word. 

Define what confidence means for you.

Now, confidence can mean so many things to so many different people, and it's important for you to understand and sort of define what confidence means for you. But for the sake of the ambitious and balanced working mom community, here's how I want you to think about confidence. 

Confidence is the way you see yourself. 

Confidence is essentially the belief that you hold in yourself. If you want to create a life that feels balanced, your confidence, or the way that you see yourself needs to be unshakable. 

Meaning no matter if you just got one thing checked off your list or ten things checked off your list today, you still believe that you're good at what you do and you're on top of things and you're super valuable. 

Meaning no matter if your kids are absolute terrors and they're fighting and they're hitting each other or they're being mean to other kids, you still believe that you're a great mom and fully capable of figuring out how to help your child. 

Meaning no matter if you completely botched a client presentation or you lost business for your company, you still know that you're good at what you do you deserve the job and that you have, you're fully capable of landing the next client. 

Unshakable confidence is when you believe in yourself. 

No matter how much you fail, what anyone else thinks or feels or how your kids behave or turn out, you know that you are enough, that you are good enough, and that you're doing enough. 

The enough triad.

Those are the three core beliefs. I call them the enough triad. The problem I most commonly see for my clients when we start working together and building up their confidence again…I know that sounds really cliche. I actually use a lot of very practical strategies in order to do this. 

But the most common thing that I see from ambitious women, it tends to be that their confidence, or really they place their confidence in their value, in their achievements, in their successes. 

It's actually part of what makes you ambitious is that you have big dreams, you have big goals, you have big things that you want to achieve. So there's a lot of emphasis on achievement. It makes total sense, right? 

Not only that, most people are rewarded for more achievement, right? That's kind of embedded in our culture. So the more you get done, the more you achieve, the more valuable you are to your company. 

The problem with seeing your confidence in this way is that you see yourself, like, your belief in self tends to be very intertwined with achievement, which means that it has you kind of going up and down like a roller coaster. Right. 

When you feel amazing about yourself, when you're checking all of the boxes, when you're getting everything done, when you're hitting all of your goals, when you have a clean house, when you have everything put away, when your to do list is short, when people are giving you pats on the backs and acknowledging your achievements and successes, you feel amazing about yourself. 

But likely, since you became a mom, you simply cannot put that much time and energy into that level of success. 

And so most days, you are not actually checking everything off your list, and you are not achieving at the level that you want to achieve, and you are leaving things undone, and you are coming to meetings less prepared, and your strategic time has drastically gone down because of that, because your confidence is so intertwined with achievement, and you're not achieving in the same way that you were before, you start feeling terrible about yourself, right? 

So when you're checking everything off the list, you feel awesome, you feel on top of the world. When you're not, you feel terrible about yourself. 

And this is like moment to moment sometime within your day, right? You have to feel amazing all of the time about yourself. 

If you want to experience balance, you have to have sort of this calm, internal self talk.

If you want to experience a life of balance, which means you cannot be going up and down every day or moment to moment on a rollercoaster, feeling good about yourself when you're on top of things and terrible about yourself when you're not. Right? 

The way you see yourself needs to be unshakable. 

You need to separate your self-value from your achievements.

And the way I teach my clients how to do this is to separate themselves and their value from everything that they achieve and all of their successes, and instead to see themselves apart from their job, apart from their accomplishments, and even apart from their life. 

As a mom, you are a human being first. You exist and have value apart from the things that you do. 

If you're ever going to get to the point where you are changing your work behavior and prioritizing differently so that family and fun and rest come before productivity, right? 

Those are the things that are actually going to have to happen in order for you to experience balance. 

You're going to have to put family and fun and rest before productivity if you're ever going to do that. You can't be going up and down like a roller coaster, feeling like a failure most of the time. 

Your human value.

One of the simplest illustrations I can give you to talk about what I call your human value. The best way to think about human value is to think about your kids. Right? 

When they were born, literally when you held them for the first time, they brought you so much joy. They enhanced your life. They brought value into your life, into everyone else's life around them, right? 

Value simply because you exist.

Not because they did anything. I mean, they've only basically breathed air for just a few moments or minutes. They haven't achieved anything in their life. And yet they brought value to you simply because they exist. That's their human value. 

Now, the same is true for you. You have human value. You are worthy and valuable and successful and lovable and good and capable and amazing just because you are. 

When you let that truth sink in where you believe it, no matter how much you accomplish or what anyone else thinks or does, that is where inner calm and peace and groundedness will become available to you. 

Your confidence, your belief in self, comes not from what you do but from who you are. 

In coaching, I walk you through three powerful exercises to shift your confidence away from your achievement and into your human value. 

In coaching, I help you name your core values. That's the first one. Those are the things that are most important to you. And we think about that and look not just through the work lens, but just through life lens, right? All of life. 

The second exercise I walk you through is your identity and understanding how you uniquely show up in the world and the value you uniquely give to the world. 

The confidence trifecta. 

And then the last exercise I walk you through is your purpose. That's why you existed. I call this the trifecta, your confidence trifecta. 

My clients tell me that after these exercises, they feel completely different about themselves. They're able to let things roll off their back a bit more. They feel less tired, they feel less of that need to get absolutely every little single thing done and check everything off their list. They're willing to say no more, to hold their boundaries more, just because they see themselves through a different lens. 

Understanding and having language, to describe yourself at this core level of who you are is not only going to help your brain see yourself differently, you're going to start advocating for yourself differently, because you know what you're all about and you know what really matters to you. So you stop trying to do everything for everyone and you simply focus on the things that matter to you. 

I know some people say that you can't have it all, and others say you can have it all, but just nothing all at the same time. I actually believe that you don't want it all. A super fulfilling and balanced life is a ruthlessly edited life. 

It is a life where you focus only on the things that truly matter to you and that bring you joy and help you live life the way you want to live life. And you're never going to know what that is unless you look inside of yourself for answers. 

Now, I walk you through these three exercises at the very beginning of our one on one coaching journey together, because I want them to be the foundation of the rest of our conversations that we have over our six months together. 

Right away, I want you to start feeling more confident in yourself, clear on what's most important to you, and really ready to go after that life that you want. It doesn't take months and certainly not years, right? 

Hiring me as your coach is the most expedited way to achieve an ambitious and balanced life that you want. 

Confidence. That's the second c, right? 

Clarity. That's knowing exactly what it is you want in life. Having your clear priorities clear, like career goals, life goals, confidence. 

That's the second c that we talked about right here today. Having an unshakable view of yourself, where you know and believe in who you are, no matter what happens or what anyone else thinks. 

And the next week we're going to talk about the last c: control. Don't forget to sign up for that free breakthrough call where you can be walked through these same three exercises yourself, where you will start to feel grounded and certain in who you are, what it is you want, and have all of the tools to go after it. 

Until next week, working moms, let's get to it. 

Rebecca Olson